The media has a formula whenever Trump Derangement Syndrome comes up, and it never changes. We all know exactly what it is and what it means. The media clearly knows it, too, but doesn't report on it accurately. Instead, they try to take the term and reframe it as an insult to those who use it, rather than to those the term is actually about.
The latest example came this week from the Buffalo News, in a story about a police union warning its own officers ahead of Saturday's "Freedom Rally" in Niagara Square, where City Hall is. The Buffalo Police Benevolent Association sent members a text message Thursday laying out the threat in blunt terms, according to a copy that the paper obtained.
"Officers working the Trump rally be aware of people with extreme TDS as they pose a threat to people trying to peacefully assemble and voice their right to free speech," the union told members. "This current city administration values the libtard ways more the (sic) celebrating this great nations (sic) 250th birthday."
I could write a whole article about this story on its own, and I was going to, until I read the following line in the story:
Trump Derangement Syndrome is a phrase used by Trump supporters about people who criticize the president.
Excuse me? There may be competing definitions of TDS, but it is not a universal term for anyone who simply criticizes President Trump.
This week alone gave two more examples of the same trick after President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself as a doctor treating celebrities for TDS, and HuffPost described it as simply a video "depicting himself as a doctor treating celebrities who have criticized him." Forbes framed it the same way: "TDS is a reference to 'Trump Derangement Syndrome,' an insult the president regularly uses to attack his most prominent critics."
Under that definition, disliking Trump's policies makes you a TDS victim. But, I’m sorry, it’s not simple. Over and over, these outlets treat TDS as a slur Trump supporters throw at anyone who disagrees with him. Rosie O'Donnell, who left the country over Trump over absurd claims she no longer felt safe in this country, has TDS. Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), who pardoned a child rapist rather than let Trump's immigration policies allow him to be deported, has TDS.
If you can healthily disagree with Trump’s policies, then you don’t have TDS. The problem is that so many on the left don’t. And they’ve let what amounts to basic policy disagreements with a politician overwhelm their entire existence, compelling them to do things most people would consider crazy.
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Manhattan-based psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert says Trump Derangement Syndrome is real, and he sees it in his office constantly. Alpert recently made the case on Fox News, on Harris Faulkner’s show, that what he sees goes far beyond garden-variety political dislike.
"This is a profound pathology, and I would even go so far to call it the defining pathology of our time," Alpert said.
Patients arrive fixated on the president, and it doesn't take long for it to surface. "People are obsessed with Trump, they're fixated, they're hyper-fixated on Trump," Alpert said, adding that it takes "probably five minutes" before their feelings about him dominate the session. The symptoms mirror clinical anxiety and obsessive-compulsive patterns. "They can't sleep, they feel traumatized by Mr. Trump, they feel restless," he said. One patient couldn't even enjoy a vacation. "I had one patient who said she couldn't enjoy a vacation because anytime she saw Trump in the news or on her device, she felt triggered," Alpert said.
And this just wasn’t happening under Joe Biden with people on the right. ”I had patients who hated Joe Biden, but it never rose to the point where they wanted him dead or would stay up at night, obsessing over Joe Biden the way that they do over Trump," he told Peter Doocy on The Sunday Briefing in November. "And that's where I think the pathology comes into play, if it's affecting your life that profoundly. And I would even go so far as to call this a mental health epidemic, and in some ways the defining pathology of the past decade."
Trump "dominates probably about three-quarters of the sessions,” Alpert holds with patients, he said, and his job is helping them separate "what's fact and what isn't." That includes talking patients down from conspiracy theories. "If you think that Trump is going to round up the gays and send them off to an island, or if you think that Trump is a Nazi — look, these things are not proven, they're not fact at all," Alpert said.
The media knows exactly what Trump Derangement Syndrome is, and it's pretending it’s just a slur used against anyone who disagrees with Trump in order to protect the people who have it.
